Wednesday, September 13, 2017

The World Anti-Doping Agency has dropped violation charges against 95 of 96 Russian athletes. The New York Times quotes Olivier Niggli, the agency’s director general, from an internal agency report:

“The available evidence was insufficient to support the assertion of an antidoping rule violation against these 95 athletes."

We do not comment on the sports politics involved here because we simply have no first-hand information about that, as most commenters also do not, many such commentaries being merely idle speculation and opinion, without supporting factual basis.

Important to note is that protection of athletes should be the top priority of any anti-doping agency and that doping charges should not be levelled at anyone without sufficient evidence. That principle has been applied here by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Thursday, September 07, 2017

Verizon Communications recently purchased AOL and Yahoo and fused them into an entity called Oath Inc., also called "Verizon Digital Network". We recently accessed our Flickr account and learned there as follows (info in quotation marks was excerpted by us):

"Yahoo is now part of ‘Oath’, a digital and mobile media company with more than 50 brands globally (including Yahoo, HuffPost, Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone and Makers), and a member of the Verizon family of companies working to shape the future of media....

We would like to inform you in advance that, as of 18 September 2017, Yahoo and Oath plan to share some user information within the Verizon family of companies which will enable us to integrate our business, allowing us to coordinate more and improve your experiences....

Your information is used to continually deliver innovative, engaging and entertaining products and services to you. We believe that we can more efficiently deliver a better experience to you by sharing user information across the various Oath brands and within our Verizon family of companies. We will use this shared information to integrate and improve our services, and to provide more customised advertising & content, as well as for other analytics purposes.

We will share the same information that our companies have previously collected and used for the development and operation of our products and services. This may include your account registration information (such as your user ID, gender, name, email address, postcode & age), your content and advertising interests, content associated with your account, the types of services you use and how you engage with them, cookie and device IDs, IP addresses, geolocation information and activity information from across our websites, apps, software and other services.

All of the information that we collect about you may be shared across the various Oath brands and within our Verizon family of companies....

Your privacy is important to us. How Yahoo and Oath handle your personal information as well as what information Yahoo shares with third parties outside of the Oath organisation and the Verizon family of companies has not changed. The Yahoo EMEA Terms of Service and Privacy Policy continue to govern your activity when you are on a Yahoo site, using a Yahoo app or interacting with our products, services or technologies.

Integration of Yahoo into the new Oath organisation is an ongoing process. We are carefully managing your data during this period of transition, and we will notify you in accordance with our Privacy Policy as and when additional significant changes occur....

Yahoo users are empowered to shape their privacy preferences. Your ad personalisation opt-out preferences will also be shared and honoured across Oath ad systems. We recommend that users take advantage of these options to optimise their experience; however, should you prefer that Yahoo does not share any personal information with Oath and/or the Verizon family of companies, instructions on how to delete your Yahoo account can be found here."

Our comment: this is the brave new privacy-gutting data-mined world of the transparent user in an Internet where "net neutrality", and the "open Internet", as we have known them, will be throttled shadows of the past....

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